Category: Acousmatic

acousmatic, fixed-media works

On the transparency of seeing through

Posted on by Sean
fixed media immersive sound
5'17"
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, FL, 2018
R. Murray Schafer pointed out in 1977 that our soundscape is increasingly lo-fi, often the sound of traffic or, especially at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where this piece was composed, planes. While quiet is harder to come by, there are wonderful new sounds too, like the spray-paint can clicking of a hard-disk failure or powering on a belt sander. And yet, we increasingly fetishize a return to not just natural soundscapes, but the natural. Once we frame nature as being different (as a thing to return to), reality becomes an appearance of itself— obfuscating the naturalism of architecture, pharmaceutics, and software engineering under a guise of transparency. Are we ourselves not the nature to which we desire to return? In the “broken” appearance of this composition’s soundscape, perhaps we can hear ourselves in relation to the natural world as, echoing William Carlos Williams, “touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.”

Leave No Trace

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, stereo
13'18"
Denver, CO, 2017
I often think about Thierry de Duve's claim that contemporary sculpture "is an attempt to reconstruct the notion of site from the standpoint of having acknowledged its disappearance"- an insight that echoes and reinforces Robert Smithson's observation that the site of all in situ art is a 'non-site'. We are currently undergoing such drastic ecological change that the disappearance of site is no longer conceptual or speculative, but rather phenomenological. As someone who lives in a city and travels into the wilderness to hike, camp, and fish on most weekends, my repetitious behavior cultivates a sensitivity to the fuzzy boundary between environmental stewardship and the signifiers of the unnatural. Following that idea so central to Deleuze's thought, "repetition can always be 'represented' as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind." None of the sounds used in this piece come from environmental recordings; a fact that doesn't prevent the piece from being listened to as if all the sounds were.

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What Rough Beast Slouches?

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, 8-channel
11'36"
Ormond Beach, FL, 2014-

Denver, CO, 2016

Across its entirety, What Rough Beast... 'slouches' toward the musical culmination of various sonic trajectories. Pitch deviation, reverberant space, and tempo, are some of the most significant sound parameters that appear to shift across the duration of the piece. What first appear to be nuanced, intentional, and well-timed sonic events begin to appear as more a matter of happenstance. As more voices are introduced, each follows its own logic - complicating the composite sonic image that we continue to try and listen into. Some sounds appear to gradually speed up; others appear to slow down. Nuanced juxtapositions turn into complicated, irregular configurations. Nevertheless, there may emerge a growing sense of directionality. Toward what end do these sounds reach? At what point in time and space might they arrive? As we listen in an attempt to resolve the whole, relative to each of the pieces, we perhaps slowly encounter the non-existence of the whole. And yet, the whole (the composite sound mass) retains an ability to both structure and direct our attention toward the regularities that emerge across each of the sounds. What Rough Beast Slouches? is simply the playing out of algorithmically defined, globally convergent sonic trajectories; the consequence of which ultimately forces us to confront our own irruptive, discontinuous, and divergent aural attentions. 

Fleeting Conversations

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, stereo
5'12"
Denver, CO, 2016

Fleeting Conversations took shape as a series of intuitive responses to three recordings of a generative musical system. I developed the system as a wave-shaping and subtractive synthesis instrument with parametric control through multiple and hierarchical convergent functions. After generating several output streams, I selected three recordings that seemed different to each other while still individually reinforcing a sense of intrinsic directionality. I then treated each recording as a short movement, a foundation upon which (and against which) I could begin to make increasingly intuitive decisions. Most decisions concerned the emergence of continuity. I sought continuity not through a commitment to drone, but rather through deference to perceptual linkage when faced with interruption. So the bulk of my post-algorithmic compositional work focused on causing problems (on interrupting myself) by choosing how and when to interject divergent materials (including silence).

I hear the finished piece as an internal monologue of sorts-- a monologue about nothing, really, beyond the fetishization of a failure to speak. Such failure does not simply reaffirm that music is not-yet-language, but rather points toward the reflexivity inherent in talking to myself and being my first listener. As listener to myself, a perspectival change often places me in opposition to myself— the self I recognize being spoken through the sounds I hear. I imagine undergoing an fMIR brain scan while listening to my own music, and already objecting to what I believe the results of the scan will be before the scan is complete. "Yes, I did that, but that's not me now!" So I hear this music as quite claustrophobic. But for other listeners, there's perhaps a sense of lightness to it; fleeting conversations about a subject always in the process of being rewritten, always up in the air.

Improvisations with Varying Degrees of Restraint

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
7'10"
Gainesville, FL, 2012

Faced with the question of "what's this piece about?," my answer was to throw more material at it, and see (hear) what stuck, and then show it sticking. Initially, I developed a software instrument and recorded ten iteratively-layered improvisations, which then served as a backdrop or canvas for the piece. Shorter passages were then added to the mix, generated using a wide variety of techniques ranging from musical feature analysis to improvised electronic guitar. The process of working on the piece became a bit less haphazard in the striping away of material; by carving out silence and space, distinctions between the materials became possible, and ultimately, meaningful. To draw a connection with the visual arts, I often liken this way of composing to Gerhard Richter's method of painting large abstracts: "changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until its done."* Accordingly, in regards to the ever imminent destruction or transformation of the musical materials, issues of timing, pacing, and the articulation of form were some of the last things to be considered. I think of it as music in search of an idea, rather than music composed in response to one (what I normally do).

* Gerhard Richter, Panorama: A Retrospective (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 17. 



88 Attempts to Linger

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
11'24"
Gainesville, FL, 2010
The piece is a presentation of 88 harmonic sets. The size of each set decreases by one with each iteration, such that the initial set comprised of 88 harmonics, is followed by a sequence of 87, then 86.. and so on, down to 0. For each subsequent set, the fundamental is determined by dividing the highest harmonic of the previous set by the new (n-1) set size. This process maps the frequency of the highest harmonic to the highest harmonic of the n-1 set, thereby maintaining this particular frequency as a point of tangency between iterations, and across the piece. Other points of tangency emerge as a result of process as well. Frequencies within a given set match frequencies of the initial set comprised of 88 harmonics according to the greatest common factor between the number of harmonics in both sets. For example, the set comprised of 66 harmonics will match 22 of the frequencies contained within the initial set of 88 harmonics. Sets with a prime number of harmonics, or sets that do not share a common factor, will only contain one matching frequency (at the highest harmonic of each set). Throughout the piece, these matching frequencies are articulated by piano samples, played at both the matching frequency and the fundamental frequency of the initial set (32.703... hz). The 32.703... hz notes are band-passed with a high Q at the matching frequency. Non-matching frequencies are articulated using pitched percussion sounds. The percussion samples being used change according to the GCF of the current set. All non-matched frequencies start off as grains, and by the end of the piece, are given time to resonate. This trajectory is reversed for matched frequencies. Within a set, the temporal position of each frequency relative to other frequencies (independent of matching) is determined by a formant map of a low C (32.703... hz) piano sample. A frequency's mapped amplitude is correlated with a delay time relative to the initial onset of the set, such that stronger frequencies occur later in time.

Around a Spectral Round

Posted on by Sean
generative, immersive sound
4'11" (1 by 2), otherwise variable 
Gainesville, FL, 2010
This piece is actually a collection of pieces, for which different versions can be realized according to different harmonic series contraction parameters. The main gist of it is to construct a spectral mensuration canon (after Tenney [after Nancarrow]), where progressively contracted harmonic sets are played in sequence, according to a temporal offset that is calculated to ensure simultaneous arrival at each set's last remaining pitch at the end of the piece. Some large initial harmonic set is contracted iteratively by mapping the frequency of one of the partials in the curret set onto the highest partial of a new set, and then decrementing the number of partials that comprise the new set by some factor. This process can be manipulated by varying the partial-number offset (how many partials away from the current highest partial will become the frequency of new highest partial), and by varying the contraction parameter (how many less partials will comprise the new set?). Any number of (integer) values for these two parameters can be explored, within some threshold of hearing in order to realize a unique version of the piece. The version that can be heard here is 1 by 2; that is, the frequency of the 87th partial of a set containing 88 partials, becomes the highest frequency in a new set comprised of 86 partials. Each set is then played according to the order of partials (stepping up the series) and in retrograde (stepping down the series). Partials are then played against each other as simultaneities, such that the 88th partial is paired with the first, the 87th with the second, and so on.

Not a Travelogue

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
7'58"
Gainesville, FL, 2009

Not a travelogue... (informally titled, Breakfast) is a further exploration of writing music using arbitrary (often appropriated) material. Working within the everyday reality of digital audio, I usually download or rip before I listen. As a result, I have a substantial collection of both original and appropriated sound materials on my computer, seeing as how I can't bring myself to delete anything. I often find myself combing through my collection of sounds for a particular snippet, a moment that I vaguely recall having heard or I believe should exist somewhere... if I just sift through all the chaff to find it.

For this piece, I (pseudo-)randomly selected material from the wide range of sources available to me at the time of composition (sample effects libraries, acoustic instrument samples, conversations, art music, pop music, snippets of other pieces of mine, etc.). In this way, the sound material functioned as pre-given and allowed me to focus on finding a place to put each element, to think both horizontally and vertically about arrangement. Once a sample was placed in time, it was composed into the mix (sometimes processed, but often not), and its position was then treated as inflexible. Localized structures, then gesture, and eventually form, all emerged as a result of hearing interesting temporal alignments between an individual sample and the current mix. This became an engaging way to work: mixing each sample into an increasingly denser landscape and then continuing to add to that landscape until the emergent form was sufficiently articulated by otherwise unrelated material.

I should probably cite the materials I used, but honestly, I couldn't keep track of it all at the time and now each individual bit just sounds like the piece to me. In some cases, samples I used are appropriations of appropriations. Regardless, the piece is not about plunderphonics per se, but rather, a way to address our ability to both listen into and be overwhelmed by an ever-shifting soundscape. In our everyday (urban, American) soundscape, where the sounds that confront us are often out of our control but our path through them is not, we face the issue of what to attend to, and where. You just have to choose, I guess.

Quarter Space

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
6'58"
Gainesville, FL, 2008

Quarter Space explores the use of motion within an acousmatic space to differentiate between streams of musical material. The piece was composed using octophonic spatialization routines wherein both processed and unprocessed samples of the tarogato are juxtaposed, each according to algorithmically defined spatial trajectories. The stereo pair of output channels 1 and 2 were then retained to construct the piece, while the remaining 6 channels of output were discarded. The result is a music whose character is defined within an octophonic space, yet exists within a stereo, quarter space— a subset of sound material, which is drastically more differentiated than the sum of the full acousmatic sound world.

Less Than What’s Not There (Courtney)

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
3'02"
Hanover, New Hampshire, 2007

Less Than What’s Not There (Courtney) presents a conversation between two people, wherein a generic computer text-to-speech synthesizer supplants the voice of one converser. This piece forefronts a wholesale subtraction of imagined timbral, intonational, and articulative nuance inherent to the male’s missing original voice, without altering the semantic content of the dialog. It is a self-negating move, reflective of an absent self which is now somehow less than itself; a fundamental lack that is accentuated by the unique signature of the untouched female voice. The subtraction of personal sonic signifiers that (we imagine) characterize the male voice is a minimal intervention that rips open a void, which was always-already present, between the subject of the missing voice (the enunciation) and the subject of the dialog (the enunciated). As a result of this intervention the conversation's digressions into absurd topics, such as wizards, tepees, drunk girls, etc., ring with an air of distance, loss, and illusion beyond the formal contingency of the events discussed and the interaction itself. Beyond the surface of conversation, the listener encounters and identifies that which is not present, as that which never wholly is.